AMD ready for tablets—in 2012

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Advanced Micro Devices wants to be in tablets, but it will be 2012 before it starts to get traction in this rapidly emerging market. That's when AMD will field Wichita a follow on to its 9W Ontario chip now being built into small notebooks and netbooks.

Separately, the company plans to join other industry leaders adopting a new half node in process technology about every twelve months.

Some OEMs will build tablets using Windows 7 and the 1.2 GHz Ontario chip now shipping. However, Wichita, made in a 32 or 28nm process, will be a better option.

Both chips use DirectX 11 graphics cores and AMD's new low power x86 core called Bobcat announced in August. Bobcat is geared to run up to 1.6 GHz with as many as two cores in 40nm processors.

"One to 3W processors are the sweet spots for tablets," said Chuck Moore, chief technology officer in AMD's technology group.

"Part of mapping [Ontario] to 28nm process includes a nice reduction in power consumption," said Moore. "By paying attention to power management and all the other little factors, we can get way down the curve over time," he said.

"Tablets are right now a zero for the PC industry because they are essentially an [Apple] iPad phenomenon," said AMD chief executive Dirk Meyer.

"Tablets will increasingly be an important form factor," said Meyer. "We see tablets cannibalizing netbooks just as netbooks cannibalized notebooks, but tablets will be accretive over time," Meyer said.

AMD's Dirk Meyer eyes a tablet business in 2012

AMD expects the netbook market, one of the targets for its new Ontario chips, will be flat in 2011 at about 35 to 45 million units.

Separately, AMD is joining industry giants including GlobalFoundries and TSMC in adopting a cadence that moves to a new half-node process step every year. Chekib Akrout, general manager of AMD's technology group, discussed the move in a video interview.

AMD will typically build a product either at TSMC or GlobalFoundries rather than have versions of a product ported to each process. The two fabs use different gate first/gate last approaches and other unique elements in their processes. Customizing designs to the details of a process is important for obtaining optimal performance, he said.

AMD expects to be in production with 32nm parts by June, starting with its Llano processor for mainstream desktops and notebooks. It uses GPUs and an older so-called Stars generation of x86 cores.

By mid-2018 AMD plans to have production chips in a 28nm process. That will be followed by a 20nm process in production by the end of 2013 and a 14nm process in late 2015.

The chief challenges ahead are dealing with more complex lithography techniques such as double patterning and finding a way to adopt through-hole vias to merge DRAM with AMD's increasingly memory-hungry chips, he said. TSVs could become commercially viable as early as 2012-2013, he predicted.

Totally agree! After a dozen of companies in this space, they're merely just trying to participate in this market and get some publicity. Is this real for AMD? They are trying to do too many with too little resources.

At IDF this year Intel announced the E6xx series (http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207694/Intel-packs-Atom-into-tablets--set-tops--FPGAs) running at 2.7W at the low end, add the IO HUB at 1.5W and you're at 4.2W. Pretty close to the 3W and here today. So I don't think Intel's out of this battle yet.

Just in time to be too late.
Those comparing these potential future offerings with current ARM chips seem to have forgotten that the ARM chips are moving forward too, perhaps even faster.
A rising tide lifts all ships. Any process improvements that will help Atom and these AMD parts reduce power and increase speed will do the same for ARM parts.
There are a multi-core ARM parts coming down the pipe that will eat AMD and Intels' lunch in the mobile/netbook space.

This looks good to me. When they say 2012 they are speaking to the 1W-3W solution. Atom does not address that currently. Not even close!
As Jim mentioned the competition is ARM based. The performance of these devices will be much greater then most of the ARM devices. The graphics performance will be an order of magnitude better!

2012? Doesn't that seem way late? With ARM already in the market and Intel focusing on the market with the Atom, what does this leave for ADM in 2012? Sure in 2010, the tablet market is the iPad but 2011 should show a burst of Android and Win7 tablets with christmas 2011 being huge.
This just goes to show AMD isn't Intel's main problem any more, it's ARM.